


my voice, unboxed

by fitzchivalryfarseer



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Canon-Typical Blood and Gore, Established Relationship, F/F, Racism, background smattering of supporting characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-13 06:28:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28523970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzchivalryfarseer/pseuds/fitzchivalryfarseer
Summary: Teddy forgets, sometimes, that not everyone sees Cristina the way she does, as resident or surgeon or girlfriend.The reminders are usually unpleasant.
Relationships: Teddy Altman/Cristina Yang
Comments: 5
Kudos: 38





	my voice, unboxed

She’s late to Joe’s, which means she misses whatever fight broke out. The tail end of it, presumably, is the five guys scrambling out, one slung between two friends and chased out by shouting. 

It’s not often that Joe kicks anyone out. She can make out Karev’s voice, and wonders if he had anything to do with it. 

Joe signals her as soon as she steps in, gesturing for her to come to the bar. The residents are clustered on one end, Avery righting a toppled stool. 

“I’m fine,” Cristina’s saying, aggravation carrying her voice further than she means. “Mer, stop.”

“Cristina,” Meredith says, bobbing backwards, “you need medical attention.”

Teddy weaves past Avery, dropping her bag on the floor by the bar. “What’s going on?”

“Yang got in a fight,” Karev supplies, from just out of kicking range, and grins a little as Cristina tries and fails to reach him. 

“You what-” Teddy says, and stops, because Cristina turns to face her, defiant, and she’s holding a bloody tea towel to her jaw. 

“I found the first aid kit,” Kepner announces from the other side of the bar. She straightens, and sees Teddy. “Oh. Dr Altman.” 

“I got it from here, Meredith,” Teddy murmurs. Meredith steps back, and Teddy slips closer, the bar on one side and Cristina in front of her, and asks, “Can I see it?”

Cristina looks like she’s about to refuse for a second, but reconsiders. She lets her hand fall, fisted in the towel. The light is bad, but enough to see it; a cut about two inches long, quite clean, crossing the line of her jaw and travelling a little ways up her cheek. Blood gathers, slow, and assembles itself into a drop that stains on her jeans. 

“Yeah, that’s gonna scar,” Teddy says. She works the towel out of Cristina’s grasp, using it to tilt her head up. “You’ll need stitches. What the hell happened?”

“Gloves,” Kepner says helpfully, brandishing a pair over the counter. 

“He had a knife,” Meredith says, and part of Teddy takes that analytically, the way she would from a paramedic saying stab wound. The rest of her is abruptly furious.

Cristina’s hand lands lightly on the back of hers, and she realises she’s squeezing the life out of Joe’s towel. She forces her fingers open, and Cristina catches it as it falls. 

Her voice doesn't quite sound like hers when she asks, “Did he get you anywhere else?” 

“I’m not that dumb,” Cristina says, muted.

“He didn’t,” Karev confirms. “She got him good after that one, and Joe threw him out.” He hesitates, then adds, “If he didn’t I would’ve.”

“Yeah, and you might’ve gotten stabbed,” Teddy retorts. “Cristina, what the hell were you thinking?”

“It’s not like I knew he had a knife,” Cristina snaps, and Teddy catches something in the sudden cut-off, and pieces she didn’t consciously pick up start to click.

“You _started_ it?”

“He started it,” Cristina says, tired, and Teddy says, “But you threw the first punch, didn’t you?”

Cristina looks right at her then, just for a second, like she’s begging for understanding. And then she casts her eyes down and Teddy feels like she’s failed some sort of test. 

She sets that aside. “Let’s go to the pit,” she says, with a firmness that’s only slightly real. “I think Mark’s still there.” 

“Fine.”

She snags her bag from under the bar. Meredith looks worried, and protective, and Teddy catches her eye and nods. 

Cristina sets her own pace; she always has, Teddy reflects, as she hurries to catch up with the other woman, already halfway out of the bar. It’s some concession that she lets Teddy hover inconveniently close as they cross the street, her long legs close to tripping them both.

She forms Cristina’s name and bites it back half a dozen times. It feels like she’s doing something wrong, like she’ll spook the other woman somehow. 

“You can say it,” Cristina says. She’s looking ahead, so she doesn’t catch the uncertainty that flickers across Teddy’s face. “Whatever it is you wanna say.”

She’s bracing for reproach. Teddy surprises them both. “Want me to beat someone up?”

Cristina laughs, startled. “What?”

“I could,” Teddy says, grinning, and Cristina doesn’t lean into her, the way she did this morning when they walked this same route, but she does slow down a little. 

The pit’s quiet. They snag Trauma 4 and Teddy draws the blinds. When she turns back, Cristina’s pulled the bed into a sitting configuration and hopped up, towel discarded on her lap. 

“Here,” Teddy says, folding gauze into a square, and apologises when Cristina flinches at the press of it against her skin.

The door opens, and Mark says, “I was paged for a facial lac?”

“Hey, Mark,” Teddy says, without turning around, and he says, “Altman? Is that you?”

She can hear him pulling on gloves. “You know the patient?” 

“You do too,” she says, and moves so he can see. 

“Yang?”

“Hey,” Cristina says. 

He draws up a stool and motions for her to lie back, reaching out to take the gauze off. “What happened?”

“A knife,” Cristina says at the same time Teddy says, “Bar fight.”

He turns Cristina’s head with gloved fingers, looking it over. “Am I documenting this for an assault case?”

“No,” Cristina says, and Mark nods, says, “Okay.” 

He takes a history from her, abbreviated as a professional courtesy, and Teddy leans against the wall and watches and tries not to make it seem like she’s judging his work.

She is, of course, but she’s watching Cristina more. She’s answering Mark’s questions with all the ease of a doctor trained to know what he’s looking for. But her voice is flat, and she’s turned her head away, even when Mark kicks his chair back to look for a suture kit. 

He rolls closer to Teddy, taking his time to look through a drawer they both know doesn’t have what he wants. 

His voice is low. “Were you there?”

“No,” Teddy says, and swallows the tension that rises with the word. 

“Alright.” He shuts the drawer and pulls a suture kit from the shelf next to Teddy. “Pass me the lidocaine?”

“Sure.”

“Seems superficial,” Mark says, moving back to the bed and setting up. “You know the procedure, Yang.”

“Yeah,” Cristina says softly. 

Mark’s face, so well trained, betrays a flicker of concern. The stool creaks as he turns to face Teddy. “Why don’t you give us a minute, Altman?”

Cristina says nothing. Teddy straightens. “Fine.”

She slips out of the trauma room. As the door closes behind her she hears Mark start to talk.

She doesn’t really make it to the ambulance bay. But then she doesn’t need fresh air and the cloudy sky to lean against a wall and be angry and scared and selfish just for a second. 

She’s missing something important. She really hates that. 

“Teddy!” Owen says, from her right. He’s on his way past, stopped mid-step. She straightens off the wall before he can turn. 

“Owen. What’s up?”

“Trauma coming in,” he says, gesturing needlessly. “Everything okay?”

“Fine.” She falls in step beside him out of habit. “Just tired.”

“I thought you’d be home by now,” Owen says. “Or at Joe’s.”

“I got caught up,” she says, because it’s easier than trying to explain whatever’s going on with Cristina. 

“Good for me,” Owen says. He snags a gown and gloves. “Got someone coming in who took a baseball bat to the chest. I was gonna have them page whoever’s on call while I stabilised. Wanna jump in?”

“I’ll take it.”

“You sure?”

She reaches around him to grab a gown. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” He smiles. “Thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The ambulance pulls up a few minutes later, and Teddy begins to think Owen’s description was an understatement. This man has had a thoroughly unpleasant night, starting with several broken ribs and ending with a punctured lung.

“I got him from here,” Teddy says when he’s stable. She looks at Owen. “Could you take him up for me? I’ve got something I need to do.”

“Sure.” He kicks the lock off on the gurney wheels. “I’ll leave him in OR Two.”

“Thanks.”

She strips off her gloves and finds Cristina where she left her. Mark’s finished and cleaning up when she sticks her head in the door. 

“Cristina. Did you drink?”

“She didn’t,” Mark says. 

“No,” Cristina says. “Why?”

“I have a guy with severe blunt trauma to the chest. OR Two. I want you to scrub in.”

Cristina wavers. “I’m off shift,” she says, almost a question. She doesn’t say the rest, but Teddy sees it anyway, that she’s tired, and in pain despite the lidocaine, and considering it anyway. 

She says, “I’ll be in OR Two when you’re ready.”

Mark catches up to her before Cristina does. He leans up against the sink next to Teddy, crossing his arms, and says, “Is this a good idea?”

Teddy shuts the water off and leans on the sink, fingers pressing up against the cold metal. “I don’t know.” 

“I can hang around if you need me to,” Mark says. He nods to where the OR nurses are prepping Teddy’s patient. “Man might be a chest model or something.”

“No,” Teddy says, certain even before the word leaves her mouth. She forces a smile. “But thanks, Mark.” 

He straightens up, turning so they’re facing the same way. “Do you know what happened?”

He’s not looking at her, but somehow the atmosphere has become more tense. “No. When I showed up, it was already over.”

He doesn’t move. “Alright.”

She sighs. “Half the residents were there. Ask Avery if you want.” 

“I’m not making any accusations,” Mark says, defensive. 

Teddy folds her reply to that under her tongue instead of speaking. 

“She’s almost a friend,” Mark says, and when she looks at him, she sees honest concern. “You brought her in with a knife wound, Altman, and she’s not talking about it.”

“I know,” Teddy says. “I know, Mark.” 

“Okay,” Mark says, gentler. He hesitates. “Let me know if you need me.”

“Thanks,” Teddy says automatically, and then, as he reaches the door, she turns. “No, really, Mark. Thank you.”

Cristina arrives not long after Mark leaves, slipping into the scrub room. 

“Hey,” Teddy says, the water running. 

“Hey,” Cristina says, and comes up next to her. “That’s our patient?”

“Yeah.” She relays what history they got from the paramedics, which isn’t much. “We should get in there.”

Cristina puts her head down and scrubs. There is a committed violence to her movement, dedication scraping away at her skin. 

Teddy doesn’t last a minute before she says, “If a medical student was scrubbing that hard, I’d step in.” She has to stop herself physically covering Cristina’s hands with her own. 

“What you said in the bar,” Cristina says, strained, and foam blooms over the back of her hand, adds bulk to her knuckles. “I don’t start fights. I don’t throw punches, or get involved in knife fights. I don’t do that.”

“Then what was tonight?” Teddy asks, and her hands are up between them, scrubbed. She thinks Cristina would pull away if she reached for her.

“Tonight,” Cristina says, “was the exception.”

“Does it hurt?”

Cristina pauses, halfway through repairing the man’s chest wall. She rotates her wrists slightly, opening them up like a tiny shrug. “Not as much as he will.”

Teddy considers the opening. There is a false sense of security to saying nothing, to let this conversation drift back under, the way their patient is. Numbed beyond the pain he’s taken. 

She says, “But it hurts.”

Cristina looks up at her, impatient, like she’s waiting for a question. 

They stay like that, silent, until Bokhee shifts beside her to get a better grip on the suction. 

“I’ll tell you when we’re done,” Cristina says evenly. 

Cristina closes him up, because Teddy’s the attending and gets to skip things like that. So Teddy’s scrubbed out and waiting by the time Cristina strips off her gown and steps through the sliding doors into the scrub room. 

The first thing she says is, “I’m not repeating what he said.” 

Then she starts the water, and says, “I’m Korean,” biting it out of the way, like she wanted it to get lost in the sudden rush of water against metal. 

She says, “I’m a cardiothoracic surgeon, in one of the most competitive programs in the country. I am _good_ at what I do.”

Teddy knows better than to say _I know._

“I am good enough,” Cristina says, “for my mother and- and all the extended family she won’t shut up about me to, and for that guy in there, and for every test I’ve ever done.” She looks at Teddy then, and there is something of grief in her eyes, and a grim and desolate defiance. “I am good, but for everything I do, there are people who look at my face and they see _foreigner_ before they see surgeon, before they see doctor, before they see what I’m worth.”

Her voice begins to waver, but her back is drawn up straight and tense, the way Teddy’s only seen a couple of times. The space they hold between them is fragile, and deliberate, and when Cristina steps towards the door Teddy moves back to let her. 

“I’m tired of it, Teddy,” Cristina says, as she opens the door. One hand rests gently on the doorjamb for a brief, still moment, and then she is gone.

Cristina doesn’t come home that night. Teddy gets a text saying _‘at Mer’s’_. Derek texts as well. His says _‘Your girlfriend’s stolen my wife.’_

_‘Looks like we’re both sleeping alone tonight,’_ Teddy sends back.

Finding what to say to Cristina is harder. She can’t get through by calling. _‘I love you,’_ she sends.

It’s never - it’s never just been words between them. Cristina’s always read past them, and Teddy’s always been able to count on that. But now her phone screen is flat and bright and her words don’t seem like enough. 

No wonder Cristina hates texting. 

Teddy calls. She calls when she wakes up and while she makes breakfast and before rounds. It seems she’s calling every spare minute she has.

By the time the next morning rolls around, she’s mostly resigned to the fact that Cristina won’t be picking up. The phone’s ringing dutifully on speaker while she munches on Cristina’s cereal. 

Then someone picks up. 

“Cristina,” Teddy manages through the cereal. She chews rapidly. 

“Stop calling, Teddy,” Meredith groans. She sounds like she’s just been woken up. Bluntly, she says, “She’s not mad at you.”

In the background, the phone eating away at the crispness of her voice, Cristina says, “Mer, coffee’s ready.”

“Meredith,” Teddy echoes. 

There’s a sigh, and Meredith says, almost kindly, “She’s dealing with it,” before she hangs up.

She doesn’t see very much of Cristina that day, which has of course happened before. She’s just not been this nervous about it since the early days of their relationship. 

She doesn’t see Cristina, really, until late afternoon, when something makes her look up from the diaphragm she’s repairing to the gallery. 

Cristina’s standing there, one hand against the glass, the other hovering over the intercom button. 

“Hey,” Teddy says. 

Cristina presses her thumb into the button, harder than she needs to. “I don’t regret it.”

_Every time I called,_ Teddy thinks, _I didn’t know what I was going to say._ The words come easily to her now, maybe because they’re true. “I didn’t expect you to.”

Cristina hesitates. “Can I scrub in?”

Teddy smiles. She hopes Cristina can tell through the mask. “I thought you’d never ask.”

**Author's Note:**

> An alternate title for this would have been _a jaw wide enough to hold my name_ , from Natalie Wee's 'Frequent Flyer Program', an excellent poem. I have thoughts on Cristina and identity, the surface of which this fic has barely scratched.


End file.
